makes it rock most cruelly. I can only—
Wed. April 18. I was going to say I can only compare it to a wench kept at home on some gay day to nurse a fretful infant and who, having long rocked it in vain, at length rocks it in spite.... But though the rough weather and the incessant rocking does not disease me, yet the damn’d rocking depresses one inconceivably, like hiccups or itching; it is troublesome and impertinent and forces you away from your thoughts like the presence and gossip of an old aunt, or long-staying visitor, to two lovers. Oh with what envy have I gazed at our commodore, the Leviathan of seventy-four guns, the majestic and beautiful creature sailing right before us, sometimes half a mile, oftener a furlong (for we are always first), with two or at most three topsails that just bisect the naked masts—as much naked mast above as below, upright, motionless as a church with its steeple, as though it moved by its will, as though its speed were spiritual, the being and essence without the body of motion, or as though the distance passed away by it and the objects of its pursuit hurried onward to it! In all other respects I cannot be better off, except perhaps the two passengers; the one a gay, worldly-minded fellow, not deficient in sense or judgment, but inert to everything except gain and eating; the other, a woman once housekeeper in General Fox’s family, a creature with a horrible superfluity of envelope, a monopolist and patentee of flabby flesh, or rather fish. Indeed, she is at once fish, flesh, and fowl, though no chicken. But, ... to see the man eat and this Mrs. Carnosity talk about it! “I must have that little potato” (baked in grease under the meat), “it looks so smilingly at me.” “Do cut me, if you please” (for she is so fat she cannot help herself), “that small bit, just there, sir! a leetle, tiny bit below if you please.” “Well, I have brought plenty of pickles, I always think,” etc. “I have always three or four jars of brandy cherries with me: for with boil’d rice now,” etc., “for I always think,” etc. And true enough, if it can be called thinking, she does always think upon some little damned article of eating that belongs to the housekeeper’s cupboard’s locker. And then her plaintive yawns, such a mixture of moan and petted child’s dry cry, or try at a cry in them. And then she said to me this morning, “How unhappy, I always think, one always is, when there is nothing and nobody as one may say, about one to amuse one. It makes me so nervous.” She eats, drinks, snores, and simply the being stupid, and silly, and vacant the learned body calls nervous. Shame on me for talking about her! The sun is setting so exactly behind my back that a ball from it would strike the stem of the vessel against which my back rests. But sunsets are not so beautiful, I think, at sea as on land. I am sitting at my desk, namely the rudder-case, on the duck coop, the ducks quacking at my legs. The chicken and duck coops run thus and so inclose on three sides the rudder-case. But now immediately that the sun has sunk, the sea runs high, and the vessel begins its old trick of rocking, which it had intermitted the whole day—the second intermission only since our voyage. Oh, how glad I was to see Cape Mondego, and then yesterday the Rock of Lisbon and the fine mountains at its interior extremity, which I conceived to be Cintra! Its outline from the sea is something like this and just at A. where the fine stony M. begins, with a C. lying on its back, is a village or villages, and before we came abreast of this, we saw far inland, seemingly close by, several breasted peaks, two towers, and, by the glass, three, of a very large building, be it convent or palace. However, I knew you had seen all these places over and over again. The dome-shaped mountain or Cape Esperichel, between Lisbon and Cape St. Vincent, is one of the finest I ever saw; indeed all the mountains have a noble outline. We sail on at a wonderful rate, and considering that we are in convoy, shall have made a most lucky voyage to Gibraltar, if we are not becalmed and taken in the Gut; for we shall be there to-morrow afternoon if the wind hold, and have gone it in ten days. It is unlucky to prophesy good things, but if we have as good fortune in the Mediterranean, instead of nine or eleven weeks, we may reach Malta in a month or five weeks, including the week which we shall most probably stay at Gibraltar. I shall keep the letters open till we arrive there, simply put two strokes under the word “Gibraltar,” and close up the letter, as I may gain thereby a fortnight’s post. You will not expect to hear from me again till we get to Malta. I had hoped to have done something during my voyage; at all events, to have written some letters, etc. But what with the rains, the incessant rocking, and my consequent ill health or stupefaction, I have done little else than read through the Italian Grammar. I took out with me some of the finest wine and the oldest in the kingdom, some marvellous brandy, and rum twenty years old, and excepting a pint of wine, which I had mulled at two different times, and instantly ejected again, I have touched nothing but lemonade from the day we set sail to the present time. So very little does anything grow into a habit with me! This I should say to poor Tobin, who continued advising and advising to the last moment. O God, he is a good fellow, but this rage of advising and discussing character, and (as almost all men of strong habitual health have the trick of doing) of finding out the cause of everybody’s ill health in some one malpractice or other. This, and the self-conceit and presumption necessarily generated by it, added to his own marvellous genius at utterly misunderstanding what he hears, and transposing words often in a manner that would be ludicrous if one did not suspect that his blindness had a share in producing it—all this renders him a sad mischief-maker, and with the best intentions, a manufacturer and propagator of calumnies. I had no notion of the extent of the mischief till I was last in town. I was low, even to sinking, when I was at the Inn. Stuart, best, kindest man to me! was with me, and Lamb, and Sir G. B.’s valet. But Tobin fastened upon me, and advised and reproved, and just before I stepped into the coach, reminded me of a debt of ten pounds which I had borrowed of him for another person, an intimate friend of his, on the condition that I was not to repay him till I could do it out of my own purse, not borrowing of another, and not embarrassing myself—in his very words, “till he wanted it more than I.” I was calling to Stuart in order to pay the sum, but he stopped me with fervour, and, fully convinced that he did it only in the rage of admonition, I was vexed that it had angered me. Therefore say nothing of it, for really he is at bottom a good man.
I dare say nothing of home. I will write to Sara from Malta, the moment of my arrival, if I have not time to write from Gibraltar. One of you write to me by the regular post, “S. T. Coleridge, Esqre. Dr. Stoddart’s, Malta:” the other to me at Mr. J. C. Motley’s, Portsmouth, that I may see whether Motley was right or no, and which comes first.
God bless you all and
S. T. Coleridge.
Remember me kindly to Mr. Jackson, Mrs. Wilson, to the Calverts and Mrs. Wilkinson, to Mary Stamper, etc.
CLII. TO DANIEL STUART.
On board the Speedwell, at anchor in the Bay of Gibraltar,
Saturday night, April 21, 1804.
My dear Stuart,—We dropped anchor half a mile from the landing place of the Rock of Gibraltar on Thursday afternoon between four and five; a most prosperous voyage of eleven days....
Since we anchored I have passed nearly the whole of each day in scrambling about on the back of the rock, among the monkeys. I am a match for them in climbing, but in hops and flying leaps they beat me. You sometimes see thirty or forty together of these our poor relations, and you may be a month on the rock and go to the back every day and not see one. Oh, my dear friend! it is a most interesting place, this! A rock which thins as it rises up, so that you can sit a-straddle on almost any part of its summit, between two and three miles from north to south.
Rude as this line is, it gives you the outline of its appearance, from the sea close to it, tolerably accurately; only, in nature, it gives you very much the idea of a rude statue of a lion couchant, like that in the picture of the Lion and the Gnat, in the common spelling-books, or of some animal with a great dip in the neck. The lion’s head [turns] towards the Spanish, his stiffened tail (4) to the African coast. At (5) a range of Moorish towers and wall begins; and at (6) the town begins, the Moorish wall running straight down by the side of it. Above the town, little gardens and neat small houses are scattered here and there, wherever they can force a bit of gardenable ground; and in these are poplars, with a profusion of geraniums and other flowers unknown to me; and their fences are most commonly that strange vegetable monster, the prickly aloe; its leaves resembling the head of a battledore, or the